You know how when you’re bored you mess with your digital assistants to see what kind of funny responses you get? Actor-writer-host Brent Rose decided to take it a step further and have them attempt something funnier: a stand-up routine.
So he put Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri to the ultimate comic test.
He started off by assembling the jokes sitting in his office. Siri was the first one asked to regale him with a joke. Siri came up with: “What did one iPhone say to the other iPhone? I used to know this one.” Was this going to get better? That was the hope.
Next, Rose performed a set prepared with curated jokes from the four digital assistants in front of a live audience in Los Angeles. The results were....a bit embarrassing.
Rose said that he had expected it to be rough – and it was. The audience reluctantly chuckled at some of the jokes, and that was all the indication that Rose needed to tell him that his experiement had, well, revealed just how much work was needed to make the digital assistants funny.
Based on the laugh-o-meter that Rose recorded on the set, Siri was declared the least funny, followed by Alexa, Cortana and Assistant. Now Siri does marginally better if you ask her regular questions, without the pressure to be funny. For example, when Rose asked: “Siri, what’s your favourite animal?” Siri responded, “I don’t really have one...on this planet.”
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